The Community-First Advantage: Turning trust into ROI

Episode 167: The Community‑First Advantage: Turning trust into ROI

“So, the three E’s are experience, enablement and evaluation. And basically what that means is that when you’re going through all of that, you think: Where do we first want to put community? Do we want to put it in an internal network? Do we want to put it in product? Do we want to leverage it for support?’ You know, make a decision, going back to the ADAPT piece – where do you want to put it? Then, how do we want to train staff and help enable staff to understand why community is important for the company. What community is the company? And how it fits into their role. And then the evaluation is tying the ROI to it, making sure the community analytics, community metrics, all this engagement stuff that gets thrown around, how is that tied to business goals? How is that tied to growth? How is that tied to cost savings and productivity and things like that?”

Chris Catania
Author of The Community-First Advantage: How modern leaders use community
to drive growth, cut costs and compete in a changing world 

Nancy Goebel
In today’s episode, we’re diving into a conversation that’s been years in the making. My guest, Chris Catania, is a long-time community leader, practitioner, and now author of ‘The Community-First Advantage’. His new book is an unapologetic call to reimagine community not as a nice to have or a side project, but as a strategic system that drives growth, reduces cost, and strengthens trust and loyalty in an era when both are scarce and invaluable, especially as AI takes hold in large-scale enterprises.

This is Nancy Goebel, DWG’s Chief Executive and your host. Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by Digital Workplace Group. Join me now in conversation with Chris. Happy listening!

Chris, I’m just so delighted to have a chance to catch up with you. I appreciate it’s been a while. But sometimes there are just moments that matter and you have to reconnect with someone in your wider orbit. And this is one of those moments! And it’s a cross between celebrating a milestone moment and having a great conversation about the ‘It’ factor that goes along with it. And so let me first pause and say welcome and thank you for coming into the studio today.

Chris Catania
Thank you. Yeah, it’s been exciting thinking about reconnecting with you – and I love the show, love what you’re doing at the podcast, and you’ve always done great work.

Nancy
Terrific! So let’s start with a little note of celebration. We’ve been travelling in the same circles for many years now, dating back to your days at Walgreens. Your career has taken twists and turns since then, and that culminated recently in you authoring your first book. And it took me immediately back to conversations that we’d previously had. You have been someone for many years who’s taken a community-first approach to helping organizations think about how to bring the best out in, yes, community, but also collaboration, customer engagement, and ways of working. And so, to bring to the industry the community-first advantage as a first-time author is something to be celebrated.

Chris
Thank you. Yeah, it’s a journey, right? I’ve always admired people who could write books. And, as a writer myself, I’ve always loved the process of doing that and I had a couple of good friends who are familiar with what I’ve been doing and they were like, ‘Hey Chris, you should write a book’. And I was like, ‘OK, great. I’ll get right on that!’ And, during the process, it became clear that, you know, I enjoy the writing process – but even more, I enjoy helping leaders. And, you know, in the last 20 years, but even more, I think, today, the message of community-first and building communities, building trust… helping companies build this infrastructure and guiding the mindset and how do you make this work within the organization and all these different things, right? So, out came a book! About two years of interviewing a hundred different leaders, analysing 50 different companies – going through and trying to put that in a way, in a narrative, that fits today. Thankfully, I’m getting a lot of really good responses from it.

Nancy
As you were sharing, I immediately thought, this is like writing a dissertation and I feel like I should be addressing you as Dr Chris in all of this!

Chris
You don’t have to. You can call me Chris!

Nancy
But I do think that the book coming out – it has landed at a pivotal moment. When I think about what’s going on around us: loyalty is fragile; markets are shifting quickly; technology is disrupting ways of working; AI and otherwise. And we’re at a point where the leadership paradigms inside of organizations are changing too. And so, you know, for some organizations, the idea of community has been a side project or a pet project, and reading through the pages of the book suggests that it’s really time to think about community as a strategic system in an organization – one that can drive growth, reduce cost, mitigate risk, when designed well. However, it can also be a way to create a new level of glue when people need that, especially as the new hybrid, AI and HI (the human intelligence) are needing to come together. I feel like it’s a compelling time, but you may have another layer to this in terms of your origin story that you want to add to that perspective.

Chris
No, that’s a great setup, thank you. Because yeah, I’ve been saying, we’re living in interesting times, right? And I think there’s a lot of pressure on leaders. There’s a lot of things coming at them. And, you know, again, the idea of the book and really the driver behind my work and why I do it, is to help leaders see that the times call for a different way of leading – you know, a different way of thinking through organizational challenges, market forces, things like that. So, and thankfully, it’s not like leaders are the first – if somebody’s curious about ‘What does that mean? and ‘Am I going to be the first one to do that?’, well, the answer is ‘no’, right? There’s leaders out there that have already done it! I talk about them and I’ve interviewed them and I’m personally inspired by them because I know how hard it is. But I think, at the end of the day, the thing is that the times call for a different way of leading. The ‘command and control’ or the idea of ‘top down’ and things like that are fast becoming, if not already, obsolete in that way.

It’s almost kind of scary and concerning if that is the strategy, right? If that is the mindset, knowing that customers and employees are looking for connection; they’re looking for a better way of working; they’re looking for these things, right? Because we’re in the middle of – and have been for several years now – in the middle of a loneliness epidemic that includes the work experience and includes the customer experience. There’s not anybody that’s immune to that.

So, leaders have to think about that, right? You have to think about how am going to structure my own individual mindset as a leader? And then how am I going to flow that down to how I lead my organization? Even the market? And then the world, you know… because that’s kind of the flow, like the opportunity impact flow that I lay out. And I talk with leaders and I say ‘Well, if you believe in the power of community, you see it as a new operating model; you see it as a new leadership model. First you transform and you go from a nice to have to this is a core belief of what you believe. That changes you first. Second is it changes your organization – your team and everything – and then that organization is transformed, which transforms the market, which transforms the world.’

Nancy
Chris, one of the things we talk about is that often, in scenarios like this, you’ve got the attention of leaders having tuned into this podcast. The next thing is for them to start to form a belief around a ‘community-first advantage’ and then to look for ways to put that in practice. And of course, this book does all of those things. But, I think while we have people’s attention, the first thing to do is to grab their attention around what it means to be a community-first advantaged company? And then for the leadership side of the paradigm, what does community-first day-to-day leadership look like when it’s running optimally?

Chris
What the companies that are community-first do is that they’re intentional on building a trust-based relationship through open communication and looking at those relationships as a moat, right? If you’re answering questions, you know, if you’re being honest, if you’re not scared about getting negative feedback or being told that something is not working, policy is not right, or product is bad or needs to be improved, or staff is unhappy or whatever it is, right? Being open for that conversation – because that’s what communities are; when you’re in a community, there’s honesty, right? There’s trust – all these different things that build. There’s a purpose, right? So those companies that set that environment up and demonstrate it and live it out. And when things, for example, things get difficult, they don’t shy away; they don’t shut down the community; they don’t take down posts that really shouldn’t be taken down; or they don’t stifle communication. They see the feedback, negative feedback in this case, as an opportunity to build trust in that way. And that’s what I’ve seen.

And I’ve seen the opposite of that, where leaders do get scared or they get uncomfortable and they go to the default with the control in that way. So, one example of many that I like to talk about for what does this look like: there’s this company called LEGO… I know, you might have heard of them at some point!

Nancy
Bits and pieces!

Chris
Nice, that’s a good one! That’s such a great example – and they’re often cited. But one of the stories that I like to share is this idea of this relay race. And the beginning of the relay race was at a very pivotal time in their growth as a company, right? And they could go one way or the other. They’re about $800 million or so – it’s a lot, right – in debt, and they’re trying to figure out where they are going to go in 2001. You know, are toy companies our customer or are adult fans who are playing with LEGOs and building creatively over here in this forum? Is that the future, right? So they had this leader – his name was Brad Justice – and he was led by a team of change agents internally at LEGO that saw this group of customers who were talking online about LEGO and they were excited about it. And some of the leadership at LEGO didn’t necessarily pay attention to it because they’re like, no, this is what we’ve always done; we’ve got to stay the course and go this way, right? Meanwhile, there’s this other group that’s over here on this online community, this user net group that’s adult fans of LEGO, sharing, talking about LEGO. So this one leader, he is courageous enough, forward-thinking enough, to listen to the internal change agents go out on this online forum and say, ‘Hey, I know we haven’t been listening to you, but we’re going to.’ And there’s this really interesting post that you can Google and find – you can find the actual post that he did online – where it was very transparent. He owned what they hadn’t been doing and he said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to be listening.’ And, over a period of years, he led that initiative and then product teams eventually came on board and everything like that.

But the thing is, that was one leader. And what I’ve seen in the past is that sometimes it takes a bunch of different leaders to go and scale this – because community-first, you can’t microwave it! It’s not like something you can just pop in a microwave and it comes out in six months or a year! It’s like this long-term journey, this marathon. So, Brad Justice hands it off to the next leader, who hands it off to the next leader – and they all commit to being open and being honest to including the feedback from this online community into that, and eventually there is what we know today as LEGO Ideas®. So that’s like a 7- to 10-year journey to do that. And the company turned around, right? That was that moment when they could have just stuck to the old ways in that way and kind of stayed the course.

And the thing is too, in unpacking that story for the book, I talked with someone who was in that organization. And, you know, like anything that I’ve seen too, it’s not an easy path. I simplified it there in a couple of minutes, but it’s a journey, right? Leaders have to be open to it, and they have to be able to work through these organizational challenges.

Nancy
I’m excited to come back to this idea of ROI that survives CEO and CFO review in just a minute. But I also think it’s important for us to add a few more layers to what makes the shift possible for companies to adopt or embrace this community-first advantage. And one of the anchors of your book is the ADAPT model. And I don’t want to run out of time and not explore that with you a little bit… it’s your leadership lens for building and sustaining communities inside and outside of organizations. So what is ADAPT, number one? And then, number two, what tends to trip leaders up at first when they start to leverage it as an approach?

Chris
Yeah, ADAPT is a leadership model. It is the result of 20 years of research, you know, for what are the qualities? It was a hypothesis that I had in working with leaders, and seeing those that succeed – what is it about them? So I studied that and I looked at that and I was like, okay, they have these five qualities. And being a community builder, community professional, I also looked at what are the things that make communities community – invaluable to the community members and this unique experience that businesses or just human beings benefit from? Why is that?

So, out of all that, I came up with ADAPT – and there’s a reason why I call it ADAPT and I’ll explain that in just a second – but ADAPT is: Authenticity; it’s Decision; it is Agility –emotional agility; it’s Purpose and Trust. Those are all elements that first start in the mindset of a leader. And they are definitely this evolution of servant leadership – and the reason I say that is that servant leadership was really important. And I think what online communities and the digital experience allow us to do now is to scale leadership; it allows us to essentially scale serving leadership and be able to do that for a wider audience and for a bigger impact.

So, when you look at ADAPT – and the reason I call it ADAPT is because what we were talking about earlier is that those leaders who lead with those qualities and go through this process of going ‘Okay, I’m going to check in with myself from an authenticity perspective of being true to myself… Am I being honest with how I interact with others? Am I as much as I can be (he or she) real with that?’ There’s kind of like this emotional intelligence, self-awareness component to that. Because I find what makes communities so rich is that you go in there and can say, ‘Hey, I’m struggling with this’ or ‘Hey, I don’t have it all figured out’ or ‘Hey, I wish I could do this, I need some help.’ And I know that’s a stretch – that’s really hard for leaders to do that.

So, out of all the ones, I think it’s sometimes a tie in what I’ve seen in leaders between authenticity and decision – those are the ones that trip them up the most, because there’s a lot at stake in being authentic. I think there’s a version that leaders have to find when they go through that process for themselves – you know, what is authentic? What does authenticity mean for them? And I think, when they actually intentionally go through that process, they go, ‘Oh, OK, I can do that.’

It reminds me of this story that there was this moment when I was guiding a CTO, a technical officer, in launching their community. We were ready to launch it and I’m sitting there in his office with him and he has a network open in front of him, fingers right over the keyboard and ready to do a post. He’s excited about it – and he paused and he was hesitant, and he looks over his shoulder at me and he goes, ‘What should I post?’. I could tell he had something that he wanted to say, but he wasn’t sure, right? I was like, ‘What do you want to say? Say it in your own words. Don’t worry about typos. Be yourself. That’s what people are going to connect with, with you as a leader. They’re going to see you are a human.’ And all that kind of stuff. So, he takes a couple of minutes, posts it, and it was like ‘Wow, OK.’

But that particular leader, he would come to me a year after that moment. And he was like ‘Thank you, for that.’ Because that one post began to transform how he led and he would do that once a week or twice a week. And the connection that he built with his staff, because they saw he would share about, you know, what he was going to do over the weekend, or he was looking for feedback to help make a decision on something. It revolutionized his leadership.

Nancy
So, for the ambitious who want to take steps in this direction – to translate the vision of community-first advantage into practice – I know you use this acronym, the three E’s. Tell us about how that supports and enables.

Chris
Yeah. So, the ADAPT is the mindset piece, right? We were talking about that. And the three E’s is this pattern that I recognized over the course of 20 years of going, ‘OK, well, if leaders buy into this, great.’ But that’s just the beginning, to be honest. That’s just the start line. So, just past the start line is understanding how do you communicate the value of this community, right? Because you have to get all the other internal stakeholders on board. You have to get from HR to IT, whoever it is, everybody has to buy in and you’re working with other leaders who have similar or same pressures and expectations, goals to meet, right? And some of them might not be very community-driven – and they may never be, in that sense. But for those leaders who are community-driven, the opportunity here is to operate from what I call the shared value.

So, the three E’s are experience, enablement and evaluation. And basically what that means is that when you’re going through all of that, you think: Where do we first want to put community? Do we want to put it in an internal network? Do we want to put it in product? Do we want to leverage it for support?’ You know, make a decision, going back to the ADAPT piece – where do you want to put it? Then, how do we want to train staff and help enable staff to understand why community is important for the company. What community is the company? And how it fits into their role. And then the evaluation is tying the ROI to it, making sure the community analytics, community metrics, all this engagement stuff that gets thrown around, how is that tied to business goals? How is that tied to growth? How is that tied to cost savings and productivity and things like that?

So, those three E’s, if you think of a Venn diagram, in the centre of those three E’s is shared value. And what I found is that if you just launch community and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to launch this initiative. Everybody get on board. Here it comes.’ That’s not going to work. What you need to do is go, ‘OK, here’s our plan. Here’s what everybody’s going to get out of it. Here’s what’s in it for you’  – and actually have that conversation with those stakeholders, making sure that there’s alignment with them. Because what I’ve found is that there are companies who get excited about community, but if you don’t have one or more of those E’s in the mix, if you take out any one of those to be honest, the community initiative either fails or it doesn’t deliver as much value as you thought.

For example, there’s this one company I was working with who’d launched a community. It was up for two years or so, but it plateaued and it really wasn’t doing as much as it could. So I started to work with them. I was brought in and I was talking with them and I was in this meeting one time and it was with all the leadership of the company. I was introduced and right after I was introduced, there was this vibe in the room where it was almost split. And I heard some people go, ‘I thought we’re getting rid of that.’ And then I heard other people go, ‘Wow, this is cool. I’m excited.’ And the rift was about 50:50. And I was curious why the negative, the detractors, kind of pushed away from the table and were like arms folded and all these different things. I was wondering why they were doing that. And what I found was that they were opposed to it is because they weren’t included in the initiative to begin with. It was rushed – and granted there were reasons why it was rushed – but the idea of rushing the community just to get it launched, just so it shows a value and checks a box, that is very dangerous and it’s not as effective. It’s actually a waste of time to do that.

So, what I like to tell leaders and the takeaway here is that those three E’s are a guide and they’re kind of like ingredients. I love to cook restaurant stuff – you know, amateur chef, I guess – but I always look at this stuff as ingredients. The three E’s are ingredients in whatever restaurant you run, whatever company you run, you use those ingredients to create community. And you might use a different mix of those ingredients, but the results are close to the same – the shared value. And that’s what that company didn’t do. They just kind of rushed it. Some people were on board, some people weren’t. And, thankfully over time, what we were able to do was to reengage those leaders and say, ‘Hey, we didn’t get this right, but we’re re-engaging and we’re going to do it. And, you know, we want to hear, and we’re actually migrating to a new platform and we want you to be part of that.’ And those same people, three years later – again, it took three years because these things take time, relationships take time, community takes time – they came around. But the secret ingredient there was the listening. It was the intentional ADAPT mindset at play, going to those leaders and asking for the feedback and being intentional and listening, just like you would do in a community environment, in an environment with a group of people. So that transformational moment over three years led to customers being aligned, coming back into the community. Staff was engaged again; you know, it had a really positive effect on that. The company went to best in class and award-winning and stuff like that.

The three E’s are all based off of shared value. I’ve seen that time and time again. Leaders will be all excited about wanting to measure value and we’re going to put it in this part of the company. But then guess what they don’t do? They don’t train their staff. They don’t explain why community is important, how it fits into the role. They just assume that staff know. And even though we’re social creatures, even though we need community, we don’t always connect the dots. And we don’t always go, ‘Here’s community here, how it fits into my role. Got it, thank you.’ There has to be that change management piece which has to be part of it.

Nancy
For sure. And so, if I think of what you described as the first phase is a mirror to the organization when you lead with internal community building first – and that can be a pathway to building trust. It’s priceless on the one hand, right? But it can be a catalyst for reducing risk and churn in the organization. As organizations spike the curve on that and you think of what happens next before they become best-in-class, world-class companies, are there any leading indicators or measures that organizations can point to in understanding that next leap that can happen?

Chris
Great question. I think there’s a couple ways to look at that. And one is that you can look at the community metrics – if you have an internal community, you can look at those metrics in and of themselves. They’ll give you some indication. What I usually suggest is that this is why the partnerships across departments are really important is that you’re connecting the community activity to other organizational measures; whether that’s surveys, metrics on staff engagement, and everything the company currently uses to gauge whether or not the company is growing. And the whole thing is that some leaders will just see community as a separate siloed initiative over here – and if you see it like that, you’re not going to see that metric. So, it’s super-critical important that they tie it to, say, employee surveys; you know, different things that they’re looking at – town halls feedback, things like that, where you’re paying attention to how collaboration works, right? And how people are engaging and, honestly, just direct feedback from staff.

And the other part is when you look at the evaluation piece, there’s an element that I talk about called hard metrics and soft metrics. Hard metrics are the numbers, the KPIs. Soft metrics – and I should start calling this essential, not soft – it’s the storytelling. It’s the anecdotal, right? I think that what kind of stories are coming out and having somebody be really diligent about extracting those stories because when you’re early in your journey as a company on this community-first journey, the metrics won’t show right away – and it’s important to know that and to not treat this like a marketing campaign. Look for the stories; the stories are what create momentum because the stories communicate the real human impact. So, what I’ve found is that being intentional early on, focus on the storytelling, focus on the extraction and the real explanation of how this network, or how this mindset, is actually transforming the company. And this is the other part too that’s really important for leaders is that they play such a big, big role in coming back and showing that the community mindset and the actual network that could get launched in this example is part of regular business operations. Because what I’ve seen on the opposite end of that is that something gets launched and then never gets talked about again, or it doesn’t get reported. Because employees are looking for, and even customers too, they’re looking for consistency. They’re looking to see if a leader is the real deal, meaning, ‘Hey, we launched this community – are you actually listening?’ And to answer that question, share the stories.

Nancy
Last topic area to explore is the role of AI and how it can augment, without compromising, some of the key elements you talk about in ADAPT. And so, if you had to pin-spot one non-negotiable guardrail that leaders should uphold in rolling out a community-first advantage approach in the now, relative to AI, what would that be?

Chris
I would say make sure that there is an understanding that community is both a counterbalance to AI but it’s also integrating with it. And that AI should be used to enhance the connection and not replace it. That comes through in conversations I have with staff, with leaders and with customers that I talk to all the time.

I’m excited about AI, but I’m also sceptical at the same time, so I’m kind of in the middle on that. I think that the important thing is that we are still in a loneliness epidemic; we still want belonging, we still want connection. We have this amazing tool called AI but it should not be something that takes away from the human connection or makes things inauthentic. The first A of the ADAPT model is authenticity, right? So, AI can be a little inauthentic at times, whether we’re talking avatars or we’re talking content generated that maybe wasn’t generated right from somebody or was just full-on machine and it maybe wasn’t guided. That’s the way I approach it: I think AI should be guided by a human, by somebody who has a mindset of community. This should bring people together; this should add value. It should not make anybody scared of being replaced.

So I use this eight-layer strategy that I put together. It’s not in the book, but it’s like they’re essentially looking at: experience, trust, governance, growth, integration – again, that integration is talking about working with other stakeholders to make sure your enterprise is interconnected, so if you have a community right now, you want to make sure that community is tied to your other AI initiatives across your company. And I’m seeing that that’s not always the case.

Nancy
Absolutely.

Chris
There is this speed, speed, speed thing going on and that’s what concerns me is – and don’t get me wrong, speed is good in some cases – but in this case, if we want to maintain the authenticity and trust, because I believe communities are trust engines, that’s the frame I’ve been operating and digging into. Like, what does that mean? So that’s the part where I go, ‘OK, well, if communities are trust engines and AI is fed by communities, then we need to optimize for that, we need to clean up our community so we make sure that the right data gets to the people in the right way, that the brand is protected and the employees are protected and the customers are getting the right stuff and staff is getting right information.’ Do we have communities to talk about AI?

And that’s the other part. I don’t know about you, but it’s helpful to talk about how we’re all using AI together. Community can be infrastructure for that conversation so that people are not scared, so they are optimized so that you can actually scale the use of AI in your organization because you have community there. You have networks, you’re leveraging the power of networks so that everybody’s on board and moving together as you adopt AI more across your organization. Community is this infrastructure layer to do all these things. Because the next wave is going to come; I don’t know what it’s going to be, but again, to go back to all these companies who already had been community-first for the last 20 years, they have been better positioned to train their staff and align their staff and align their customers, listen to their customers – and again, that’s the advantage because whether that’s, ‘Hey, the internet’s coming out’ 20 years ago, then ‘Hey, the internet’s here,’ or then it was social media, then it was big data, then it was mobile, or whatever it is. And here we are: AI. If you don’t have a community already set up for your staff, or to interact with your customers, it’s going to be really hard to get feedback from them on how people are feeling. And then if you have something that you want to communicate to them and have that be organic and valuable and real and building trust, you’re going to want to have a network to help people understand what that is as opposed to just sending out an email. That works, but it’s so much more valuable when you can go on your internal network and go, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about AI in this way’, or ‘I’m trying to use ChatGPT’ or ‘I’m trying to use this thing. How’s everybody else doing it?’

Nancy
It’s a relay moment – but if you really want to establish conversation, it happens in the community spaces. And so, Chris, your work is just a great reminder that community is not a channel, it’s not infrastructure; it’s a system that when it’s designed intentionally can build trust, can accelerate outcomes, can create value that compounds. And, especially as we think about the AI overlay, it can be an important part of the strategy that allows leaders and the organization to adapt.

And I imagine that you’ll have either a follow-on workbook or a follow-on book that gets to the eight layers that you were just talking about. But, for now, those who want to make sure that they don’t lose the human connection in the age of AI can find a blueprint in the ‘Community Advantage’ book. And so, I appreciate you stepping out of your day to talk to us about some of the key learnings from your research, ideas in action, and how you’ve translated that into that very blueprint that others can learn from. So, thank you.

Chris
Thank you, that’s been fantastic. I feel like we could keep going here on all these different topics. You’re doing great work as well for so many years. It’s an honour to be here and talk with you. Yeah, I’m excited to see what’s ahead, right? I think that the takeaway too is that, yeah, we’re cautious and everything, but also excited about the opportunities. I think community has immense potential to be the solution and the way forward for the things that we face and the things that are coming that we don’t have any idea about. So yeah, that’s great. I appreciate the conversation.

Nancy
My pleasure. Well, to be continued in other ways, but thank you so much for coming into the studio today. Thank you.

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